"Papa wants to have the garden ploughed," said Eugenia. "He says it takes too much time to hoe it. Give me your knife, please."
He opened the blade, and she stooped to cut off a crimson dahlia while the Indian summer sunshine slanted from the west upon her dark head and white dress. Over all was the faint violet haze of the season, hanging above the gay old garden like a delicate effluvium from autumns long decayed.
"There aren't many old-time gardens left," said Nicholas regretfully, "but I like this one best of all. I always think of you in the midst of it."
"Yes, we used to gather calacanthus blossoms and trade them for taffy at school. The bushes are almost all dead now. That is the only one left."
She laid the knife upon the grass and raised her arms to fasten a yellow chrysanthemum in her hair. As it lay against her ear it cast a clear, golden light upon her cheek, as warm as the late sunshine.
"Flowers suit you," he said.
"Do they?" she smiled in a quick, pleased way. "Is it because I love them?"
"It is because you are beautiful," he answered bluntly.
Some one had once called Eugenia's besetting vanity the love of giving pleasure; it was, perhaps, in reality, the pleasure of being loved. It was not the fact that she might be beautiful that now warmed her so gratefully, but the evidence that Nicholas was good enough to consider her so.
"You have seen so few girls," she remarked reasonably enough.